


if you don't give a doggone about it (they won't give a damn)

by thimbleoflight



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: M/M, can you write fix it fic before the story ends?, domestic AU (sort of), more of a After Everything Ends AU than a domestic AU, so it was like simultaneously discounting your child AND marking them as Belonging To The Store Now, that's what this is, the stickers that jacobi references are real and more hideous than i could describe, they had the same font and color scheme as markdown stickers, this is very very silly but i would love to write more in this verse, with kindergarten teacher kepler and grocery store cashier jacobi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 11:30:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12770118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thimbleoflight/pseuds/thimbleoflight
Summary: Back on Earth, Daniel Jacobi and Warren Kepler get their thing together.





	if you don't give a doggone about it (they won't give a damn)

**Author's Note:**

> possessedradios on tumblr said "what about kindergarten teacher kepler" and i LOST MY MIND and wrote 11.8K of words on the topic of Jacobi and Kepler living the domestic life back on Earth so this is all possessedradios' fault
> 
> Title courtesy of James Brown.
> 
> Constructive criticism is always welcome! As I haven't written anything longer than 5K since probably... last year.

“So, how’d everything go today with the  _lying to children?_ ”

Jacobi lay on the couch, a laptop balanced on his stomach, one leg over the arm of the couch, and the other folded up, supporting the back of his laptop. Warren shut the door behind himself.

“Honey, I’m home.”

“Nope. I got the smartass line in first,” said Jacobi.

“Forgive me. I assumed it was… rhetorical.”

With no room on the couch, Warren sank down onto a chair across from Jacobi, and let the cat hop onto his lap. It was late afternoon, and the light was beginning to fade from the room, but even so, Warren could see where Jacobi’s dark hair was greasy, like he hadn’t showered in a couple days.

He barely left the apartment, slept on the couch (he’d even had first choice, Warren was a gracious host, but Jacobi’d _chosen_ the couch) and spent most of his days there, too, except the occasional grocery run or getting up to play with the cat. Kept mentioning looking for a job, but Warren suspected that nothing would be really interesting after several years working as a secret agent for a tech conglomerate that ultimately sent the two of them into space and very graciously allowed them to die in a shuttle crash, so long as they never, ever mentioned their ties to—that company ever again.

They couldn’t go home, though, and there wasn’t much to that idea in any case. Who knew where their home really was? Warren hadn’t had one for a very long time. It was possible that, for Jacobi, it was back on the east coast, long before any unfortunate lab incidents. Maybe he felt like it should’ve been with Maxwell. They hadn’t been in love (or at least, Warren didn’t think they had), but they’d been… family. Close. Like siblings.

Either way, Warren spent a great deal of time considering how, most likely, Mr. Jacobi thought he probably should have ended up somewhere far more interesting than a dingy little apartment in the southwestern United States, living with a kindergarten teacher.

Interesting things didn’t matter very much these days.

Work mattered. Shelter mattered, food mattered, and living another goddamn day mattered. If Jacobi wasn’t going to work, he would damn well not lay about all day, browsing the internet—

…And if Warren got angry, that wouldn’t help. Warren forced himself to relax his hands, and slouch down in his chair.

Besides, there was food on the table. Jacobi, at least, had taken it upon himself to arrange most of the sustenance for the two of them, along with most of the housecleaning, with funds from Warren and the time he had to spare since there was nothing to be demolished. Admittedly, for the first few weeks, there had been an awful lot of cheese boards instead of dinners, with not nearly as much wine as, perhaps, might have been appreciated on Warren’s part.

“Anyway, I didn’t lie,” said Warren. “I simply—reframed some stories.”

“Mm, bet you taught them a lot about extreme germophobia. Remind me, that’s the story, right?”

Warren peeled off the leather gloves he usually wore over the course of the day, in order to avoid suspicion. No tech like his gift hand existed in the rest of the world yet—if the military was ten years ahead of the rest of the world, Goddard Futuristics had been twenty ahead of the military.

“Sure, that’s a lie, but the rest? They don’t even know it’s the truth! What are we calling her today?”

“Nov.”

Nov the cat rubbed her face along Warren’s pant leg, and curled up. He ran his hand down her side, and then all the way down her tail. She twitched her tail upwards, wrapping it around his arm.

“I like that one.”

* * *

 

“—And then Mr. Jacobi and I picked the lock. ‘Fraid I can’t show you kids how to do it, though. Katie. Is this not… entertaining enough? Is the story you’re telling Joey worth telling the class?”

Katie looked up at him, wide-eyed, and she ran her hands along the bright red square of carpet in front of her. She’d been whispering to Joey, who’d gone just as wide-eyed, and shook his head. Joey clutched the edges of his green carpet square, like he expected it to rise up beneath him.

Warren folded his hands on his lap, and raised an eyebrow at them.

“My daddy says you’re not really military,” she said. None of that cheeky tone that kids got when they were trying to get a rise out of a man. Warren sat back, raising an eyebrow at her.

He’d been expecting this. Of course, more information was required, to determine the appropriate response. He smiled.

Then again, you didn’t have to be an intelligence agent to get a young gossip to talk.

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Said you wouldn’t call him Mr. Jacobi if you were really in the army. He said Mr. Jacobi is supposed to have a rank. Like ‘captain’ or ‘officer’ or ‘kernel’ but not spelled like popcorn.”

She must’ve gone home, and repeated his stories verbatim, and was repeating even now the response she’d gotten. Clear enough, though it took a moment to… parse the sentence. Kind of like talking to Eiffel, that way.

Warren couldn’t help but be a little bit flattered. Who ever had really listened to his stories? Then again, he should’ve known. He hadn’t gotten this job as a fluke—there’d been study involved! Childhood development, of course, he’d studied it a while back during the course of an assignment for Goddard.

Infiltrating a college, finding programs that plucked out gifted students—nothing dystopian like what you might expect from, say, science fiction of the early 2000s, but a passing curiosity for Goddard, and one which needed to be kept under wraps. Warren had just started, back then, so it was the sort of long-term mission he’d appreciated the opportunity to really sink his teeth into. A chance to show off what he could do, over a matter of months. How well he could play a part.

On top of that, Warren had liked the classes, quite frankly. In his own college days he’d actually majored in business administration. It hadn’t been that useful, not in the end, but he supposed he’d taken some lessons from it. Childhood development was something you could use, looking at anyone, of any age—like psychology, with less… drama attached. Warren had tried psychology, too, in his actual college years, for about five minutes.

And at this age, they were a bunch of sponges, ready to listen, wide-eyed, to wild stories, and repeat them to their parents, who, Warren had to admit, probably had more… context, in which to analyze the stories they were being told.

Maybe he ought to have been more careful.

He’d considered giving Jacobi a fake rank—a fake name, even, but then realized he wouldn’t enjoy telling the stories quite so much. Maxwell figured in too, sometimes, but it was harder to talk about her.

But it was getting… uncomfortable to talk about Jacobi, too. Mr. Jacobi, the character in his stories, seemed different from the man that he knew was, most likely, currently playing catch-the-string with a nameless little cat on a cheap couch two towns over from here (they couldn’t afford, on a teacher’s salary, to live in the town that he taught in).

Mr. Jacobi was clever, capable, always had a quick comeback—a bomb, hidden away, with a detonator tucked safely within reach.

Well, back in those days, that’d meant that Colonel Kepler had those things, too.

“You tell your papa this,” said Warren. “You tell him to meet me at Open House Night, and see if I’m military or not. You can tell him I double-dog-daaaare him to tell me I’m not.”

This got an appropriate amount of snickering from the kids.

“—So Mr. Jacobi and I picked the lock, and the door… swung… open. And if you can believe it, the lion was right there!”

 

* * *

 

“You brought… whiskey.”

That was the easiest thing to comment on, frankly. Aside from that, Jacobi’d set the table, and put out two small bowls of decently hearty-looking chicken noodle soup. Made from scratch, even! An impressive feat, from a man who, just two months ago, could only have boasted of culinary knowledge in the realm of the dairy.

Warren resisted the urge to comment about what a good househusband Jacobi had become. It was something Maxwell would have said.

“Not good whiskey,” said Jacobi. “Cheap whiskey.”

Jacobi handed him a glass.

“Say, you ever—”

“I got a job,” said Jacobi, unnecessarily loudly.

Warren caught himself before he expressed any surprise, or irritation at having been cut off.  _I’m not his superior officer_ , he reminded himself.

“I’m going to work in a grocery store,” Jacobi continued. “I have cashier experience, they needed a cashier. I went in for the interview. They told me I had to do a drug test but that I was pretty much hired. Then I gave them a cheek swab for the drug lab, they decided that I was a nice boy, and I went shopping.”

“Oh!”

Warren beamed up at him.

“You don’t have to look so happy.”

“But I am,” said Warren. “Why would I… not be happy? You fooled them into thinking you were well-behaved. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

Jacobi scowled at him, and downed half his glass in one gulp.

“Didn’t know you had cashier experience,” Warren commented, and crossed his legs.

“Yeah, from when I was like, sixteen. Worked in a convenience store.”

Jacobi held his bowl with both hands, hunched over slightly.

Warren liked their little table. It was something he’d left in the apartment, through all the years that he hadn’t been here, and it was one of the few things that was very clearly his style. There was scrollwork on the edges—it looked, in some ways, just a little bit old fashioned, but it wasn’t old.

The placemats under their bowls, with an abstract pattern in earth tones, were all Mr. Jacobi.

“Was that before or after ROTC?”

“Before.”

“Anything exciting happen? Ever get held up?”

Warren fished a noodle out of the depths of his bowl. It was, admittedly, approaching the soggier stages of the chicken noodle life cycle.

“No,” said Jacobi. “People stole shit, and I let them walk out the door.”

Warren snorted, and then reconsidered.

“Well, for eight dollars an hour, I suppose I’d do the same. No reason to stop anyone else from making mischief.”

“Eight-fifty, in fact, wasn’t enough to make me risk my life either.”

“Well, that’s something, isn’t it? My first job, I made half that.”

“Twenty-two,” said Jacobi.

“Excuse me?”

The broth, Warren decided, was his favorite part. It had a subtle flavor, delicate, and not quite sweet. Not like the store-bought stuff, not too salty.

“They offered me twenty bucks an hour. I said twenty-two, and they offered me the job on the spot.”

Warren stirred his soup, unwilling to comment, unable to open his mouth, knowing that the only thing that would come out was  _You’re worth a thousand times that. They don’t know what they have. You shouldn’t have considered risking your life for twice what I used to pay you._

“Well, it’s not Goddard pay,” Jacobi said, with just enough of a snap in his voice to keep Warren silent, realizing that Jacobi took his pause in a different way. “Probably not even ‘cleaning up child shit’ pay. Alana would laugh at me. But it’s something, isn’t it? Twenty-two bucks an hour, and guaranteed 24 hours of work per week. Probably spread out across six days, but hey, that sixth day overtime is nothing to sneeze at, apparently. I’ve got ninety days to join the union.”

“You could’ve gone with Whole Foods, or at least a Trader Joe’s,” said Warren, trying to imagine Jacobi joining a union, and utterly failing. Whole Foods, though—that was Mr. Jacobi’s style. A little pretentious. The kind of place that required some style. The kind of place you could maybe even, perhaps, demonstrate an absurd knowledge of cheeses. He could keep the scraggly little beard he’d grown.

…Probably.

…Nah.

Warren wasn’t too clear on the protocol for grocery clerk facial hair, but frankly, the beard could stand to go, as far as he was concerned.

Jacobi was silent.

“Oh,” said Warren, realization dawning. “They… didn’t call back?”

“Apparently, I’m overqualified. But this place has no shame.”

“Don’t need it,” said Warren, trying to get a carrot to remain on his spoon. “They’ll have the best damn cashier that ever crash-landed a shuttle back onto this planet. Depth perception or no.”

“Thank you, s—thanks.”

“Warren. If you like.”

Jacobi raised an eyebrow at him. The effect was not, as one might have expected, roguishly charming, even if Warren had to admit to a certain fondness for Jacobi’s countenance. Jacobi had a sweet face—all soft curves, and gentle slopes for cheekbones and his nose.

Of course, he opened his mouth and was a sarcastic little  _pest_ , but that actually _was_ roguishly charming. One didn’t always need to have a face that matched their attitude. Frankly, the fact that Jacobi was always a surprise, was what was really charming.

Or it had been, at one point.

“We’re roommates, isn’t that right?” Warren asked. There was a time when an  _isn’t that right?_  from Warren would have, very nearly instantly, received a  _that’s right, sir!_  from  _Mister_  Jacobi.

Jacobi turned the spoon over in his mouth, and sucked on it for a moment. Warren waited, turning his attention back to the soup in front of him. There had to be some reaction, didn’t there? But there was nothing. Not surprise, not a smile, not… even anger.

“Oh, sorry,” Jacobi said. “Did you think I was going to say, you can call me Daniel? ’Cause I’m not, and you can’t. I had one friend who called me that, and she’s _dead_.”

Warren set his spoon down, leaned back in his chair.

“Offer’s open, is all I’m saying.”

Jacobi continued to spoon soup into his mouth, as though he hadn’t even heard. Warren began to wonder if he hadn’t.

“So when do you start?”

“Training’s next week,” said Jacobi, shortly.

Dinner ended… very quickly.

* * *

 

“How’d everything go today with the customer service?”

“A child yelled at me and I gave it an ugly sticker,” said Jacobi. “For a brief moment I had an inkling of what it was probably like to be you.”

The cat was in the chair, so Warren gently nudged Jacobi’s feet aside and sat on the couch. Jacobi sighed.

They’d reached another sort of truce. Jacobi was good at… putting things aside, to get his work done. It was an admirable quality in a demolitions expert who you could ask to blow up anything. It was a less admirable quality in a roommate.

“Surely, that wasn’t your only customer.”

“There were others. They paid for things, and forgot how to use the chip reader. They still don’t know, and I’ve seen them every other day or so this week. Forgot bags, too, and complained about it for the whole transaction.”

“Ah. Regulars. Sounds nice.”

Jacobi put his feet on Warren’s lap.

…That was new. Jacobi kept his gaze firmly on his laptop, and Warren suddenly realized they were playing a very strange game of chicken. Mr. Jacobi was not a small man, but it wasn’t an accident.

Jacobi had big feet.

Warren leaned on the side of the couch, and rested his chin on his hand. They had a shit view from their window, but anything, after the inky void of space—the vast expanse of the cosmos, before them, would be a shit view.

How had he never noticed before how big Jacobi’s feet were? Jacobi must’ve showered, right after he got home from the store. His hair was still damp at the ends, and he smelled of Irish Spring soap, and just a little bit of chlorine—they didn’t have very good water in this apartment—

“Fuck ‘em,” said Jacobi. “Somebody wanted change for a hundred. I don’t have that much cash in the register. Ever. Just so you know. In case you ever wanted to rob a gro—”

“Oh, haven’t I told you?”

Jacobi groaned.

“You don’t need to. I already know all the stories.”

“It took three of us in total—”

_ After a while, you kind of figure out how to tell when he’s just enjoying the sound of his own voice. _

Warren stopped.

Jacobi leaned back in his chair. Warren waited for a prompt to continue, but the silence stretched out, and the cat hopped off the chair, crept back towards them, and leapt up into Warren’s lap.

He stroked her fur, as Jacobi’s typing filled the air.

“Good girl,” he said to the cat, who’d begun to purr.

_I’m not going to wait any more_ , he thought, and she blinked up at him, stretching out a paw until it rested against Jacobi’s foot. Her tail twitched, idly, as she stared at a point somewhere near his stomach, not nervous, just thinking. Blinking, slowly.

“What’re… ya typing?” he asked, more to fill the silence.

“Stuff,” said Jacobi. “Ooh, I bet you’re real pleased with yourself. You actually bothered to ask about someone else for once, instead of just trying to tell me how you used to _make mischief_.”

“You don’t think I care?”

“Uh, doubt it,” said Jacobi, but the typing stopped, just briefly. “Anyway, if you’re asking, it’s another job application. I’m  _preeeetty_  sure I can do better but at least I have the cashier thing for now. But I’m thinking an office job might give me some more room for growth. I keep looking into demolitions, or even construction, but that might be too close to what Goddard might expect.”

“Good,” said Warren. “I think you can do better, too. You know, one of the secretaries at the school is talking about retirement. I can put in a good word for ya.”

Jacobi narrowed his eyes.

“You can be damn sure I’m not going to go apply to be a secretary at your fucking elementary school. I’d have to hear all day about—Warren this, Warren that, from the teachers, Mr. Kepler said you used to work with bombs, Mr. Kepler said you don’t like ducks, from the students. No way in hell.”

“Aw, it might be fun,” said Warren. “We’d commute together, drive home together, gossip about the other teachers—”

“Ha, ha. No thanks!”

Warren tilted his head, curiously.

“Look,” said Jacobi, sharply, “I’ve been your coworker for… a few years now, right? Thanks, it was pretty great. Really loved blowing up  _hospitals_  and kicking  _puppies_. But also, no thanks. Not now. Maybe not ever again.”

Warren held up his hands.

“I was just doing my job—”

Jacobi sighed.

“Is that really how you see it?”

Warren tilted his head the other way.

“…I admit,” he said, finally. “I… recruited you, because you said you didn’t have a chance to work on this planet, ever again. But I—”

Jacobi slammed the laptop shut.

“You did me a _favor_.” He bit the words off—Jacobi had a way with sarcasm, when he wanted to. Warren just wished that it wasn’t directed at him. “But you treated me like shit, too. You didn’t trust me or—or anyone else enough, and I want to be my own person again. Let’s… let’s try that. Let me get a job. Where I’m not working with you.”

Warren smiled.

“You know, I always thought it was my duty—but I never gave you enough credit for coming up with the good plans.”

That, unfortunately, shut Jacobi up.

* * *

 

“Lima,” said Jacobi.

“Afternoon, Miss Lima,” said Warren, scooping her up and settling down into the chair with her. She mewed at him, but curled up when he began scratching behind her ear.

“She brought us a mouse,” said Jacobi.

“Our little girl… already bringing home the bacon. They grow up so fast!”

Lima rolled over in his lap, enjoying the ear scratches, her round eyes blinking slowly.

The decor in the house was all Jacobi’s, even the little cat toys that were strewn about the place. Warren never failed to think about that, every evening. Simple lines, neutral colors, a light-brown carpet that very easily might once have been white, but which now owned up to its new hue well enough that they decorated around it. A very boyish look, to their little apartment.

Warren would’ve picked bright, warm colors. Big patterns, vases with flowers. A record player, just for the fun of it. Then again, the cat would’ve probably scratched it up.

Jacobi, on the other hand, filled up the place with soft blankets, all in varying shades of beige and blue—seemed every day Warren came home, there was a new blanket thrown over a chair back. Nice, easy color combinations, not too many patterns, or textures. A small, but surreptitiously advanced little television—doubled as a second monitor for Jacobi’s laptop if necessary. Crinkly little bits of plastic, only just sturdier enough than a few rolled-up balls of tinfoil, to warrant being purchased on their own, along with a few little stuffed mice.

It was Jacobi’s place, with Jacobi’s cat. Warren just… paid for it.

Of course, that wasn’t stopping Jacobi, apparently, from having stolen one of Warren’s _shirts_. Warren considered saying something— _looks good on you_ —and… didn’t.

The shirt—a simple, plain black tee, notable only for the logo of a company that Warren had worked with a few years prior to joining Goddard—would have been tight around Warren’s shoulders and looser around his stomach. On Jacobi, the differences were striking enough that Warren wasn’t quite able to look away. Not quite too large, but Jacobi’s shoulders weren’t quite so broad, and his midsection wasn’t quite… toned. Warren had, of course, been well aware of Jacobi’s physique for years—in a strictly professional sense. When one worked in a physically taxing job, one was aware of the limits of each of one’s team members. Jacobi could’ve handled anything Warren asked of him, even if he might not have modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch.

This, unfortunately, did not stop the sight of Jacobi in Warren’s shirt from being… distracting. It was the familiarity of it, too, bitterly casual.

He moved to scratching Lima’s stomach, where her fur was soft enough that it was barely noticeable to the touch. Warren had never really had the opportunity to observe the difference between a healthy cat and a malnourished one, but he could see it now in Lima. She’d grown sleek and just under round, even, over the past few months. _Focus on the damn cat_ , he told himself. _Stop… ogling Jacobi._

“I can’t believe she likes you better than me,” said Jacobi, with more distaste than he’d had for the dead mouse.

She stretched out a paw in Warren’s direction, and he tapped it, very gently, with the tip of his finger—or tried, before she curled her paw back in.

“No high fives for me, huh?”

The first thing they picked up, back in what Warren thought of, generally speaking, as the “rough days,” shortly after the crash of the shuttle, was the cat. She was a pretty gray cat, with a sweet, round face, and big amber eyes. Her name depended on Jacobi’s mood, given that Jacobi was the one who insisted on keeping her, a conversation that had, roughly, gone like this:

  1. Warren insisted they did not need a cat.
  2. Jacobi insisted that the cat needed them.
  3. Warren commented that care of another creature was not very like Jacobi.
  4. Jacobi informed him that he did not give a shit.
  5. Repeat.



Step 5 lasted approximately three days. In those days, Jacobi tended towards a mood that could only be called hysteria. Warren hadn’t been able to do anything but accommodate it, or risk losing his only ally.

…And Jacobi, despite everything, despite the cat, had been a good ally.

_You push people too hard_ , he’d thought, and Jacobi clutched the cat in his arms all the way through their drive to the apartment that Warren’d kept, under a different name, 300 miles away from the site of the shuttle crash, which had set a corn field on fire. (Goddard would have fun with that one.)

She’d peed in the car twice, and shit in it once, and they’d smuggled her into three different hotel rooms before arriving, exhausted and covered in the dirt of four different states, at Warren’s apartment. She’d clawed the hotel rooms, and Warren’s legs, though Warren couldn’t bring himself to care too much. (When they were gone, they were  _gone_. They paid in cash, and switched cars three times.) Jacobi didn’t make the argument that she was sweet, deep down. He didn’t try to come up with reasons that they could afford the cat, didn’t try to argue that the cat would grow to like Warren. No logic to it.

No logic, at least, none that Mr. Jacobi opted to share with Warren. Just a cat, which, Warren believed (and he informed Mr. Jacobi of this belief on several occasions), would have happily taken any chance to get out of the rain. It didn’t need to be them.

Step 4 was repeated fairly often on these occasions.

It was at this point that Warren realized—not when Jacobi was holding a gun to his head, not when Cutter showed up on the Hephaestus, not when—not any other time, but at that point, staring down the barrel of an angry cat, Warren realized he was not Jacobi’s superior officer.

“She respects you,” he said, back in the couch, still gently tapping his finger against the cat’s paw, even as she batted at him. A tiny high-five. “You saved her, and she knows it. Me? I’m just a roommate. You don’t reach out to your god for the little things, like a belly scratch.”

The cat hopped down off of his lap, and began to scale the cat tree that Jacobi had bought for her. Jacobi’s eyes tracked her, a soft smile crossing his face.

“She prefers to sleep on you, anyway,” said Warren. “You’re the safest spot for her.”

He’d caught Jacobi kissing the top of the cat’s head a few weeks back, a rare, affectionate moment. The cat had wriggled out of his arms, and Warren had pretended that he hadn’t been paying attention, but he… still thought about it. Same way, he suspected, he’d think about how Jacobi looked now, in Warren’s shirt, face relaxed and open—

Right until he caught Warren staring.

“Joke’s on her,” said Jacobi, expressionless again—jaw jutting out, just a little, in defiance.

* * *

 

There were routes you took in the world if you didn’t want to be noticed. If you landed in the middle of nowhere, you could take a dozen roads out of there, and only a few would lead to an equally impressive nowhere, where you wouldn’t be found.

So he supposed it wasn’t surprising, to hear a radio DJ with an untrained lyric baritone, on their own local radio no less, introducing himself as Dougie, and talking like all of film and music of the previous fifty years had been chopped up and placed in a blender. Presumably, that was the charm of the show.

It was three weeks before he dialed the number.

Rain beat down on the sides of the car—for all that Warren could see, they might have been alone on the roads, or out in space, even, the lights outside just comets passing by. Two couldn’t pilot a Hephaestus—but one could drive a car while the other made a phone call.

“You’re on air, bud!” A goofy laugh. “Bring a basketball?”

“Longtime… listener. Longer… than you might think,” said Warren. “First time caller.”

There was a very, very long pause.

“Nice to hear from a longtime listener! Tell me, how’d you hear about the show?”

“There it is,” whispered Jacobi, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “He knows it’s you, oh my god, oh my god. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Keep talking.”

“Oh, you know,” said Warren, unable to keep a slow smile from spreading across his face. “It’s a long story. I’ll make it short for you. Somebody told me, there’s this show on the radio these days, the DJ is just out of this world.”

Warren covered the mouthpiece of the phone just as Jacobi groaned, and made a sharp right turn.

“Hey—”

“You all right there?” said Eiffel.

“No worries,” said Warren, as slow and easy as if he’d been on stage with the guitarists behind him. “Got a co-pilot in this car who thinks we’re off to the races. Took a sharp turn.”

“Gotcha. Anyway, thank you for all the compliments!” said Eiffel. “You tell your friends thanks for me, too. That word-of-mouth is really what gets around, you know? You got a request for me, big guy?”

“Tell him it’s for—Daniel,” said Jacobi.

“Yeah,” said Warren, beaming. Jacobi’s eyes went wide, just as Warren said “Bo…lé…ro. A favorite of my good friend Daniel. By Maurice Ravel. Premiered in 1928. The entirety of the piece is just two melodies, developed over seventeen different instrumentations and—well I’m sure you know the rest. The retail drone life is hitting Daniel hard, but this’ll really brighten up his day. Thank you!”

He hung up. Jacobi was snickering.

_My good friend Daniel_. Jacobi must have meant it for the joke, but—it felt so—so—

He wondered if he should’ve taken back his earlier offer to let Jacobi call him by his first name. Was this what that would’ve felt like? Was this why Jacobi didn’t want to do it? He shut off his phone screen, trying to smile.

“What d’y—”

Jacobi waved his hands, and Warren got the message, turning up the volume of their car stereo.

“—Oh, he’s gone. There you have it, folks! Boléro, for my… pal. Didn’t leave a name, but that’s all right! Mystery caller, hope you’re having a good day, and here’s for your friend, uh, Daniel.”

The strings began, soft, building to a crescendo.

“He doesn’t know, any more,” said Jacobi. “Or, well, he’s doubting himself.”

“We should do that again next week,” said Warren, brightly.

“God, that’d be evil,” said Jacobi. “I missed that. What do you suppose he thinks we’re doing?

“Tracking him down for Goddard,” said Warren. Jacobi laughed, a loud bark of a laugh that rang against the car windows.

“I kind of—” Jacobi paused. Warren glanced up at the road before them, at the rearview mirror, which showed only another car half a mile back down the road, and counted to three before he spoke.

“Light’s green,” said Warren. “Apologies for… backseat driving.”

“Oh—yeah,” said Jacobi, as Boléro played, and he hit the gas. He had, to Warren’s absolute lack of surprise, something of a lead foot. Didn’t this kid know how to drive in inclement weather? Didn’t he grow up in _Wisconsin?_ “I think I wouldn’t mind if you called me Daniel.”

“Liked the way it sounded when I said it?”

He’d meant it as a joke, really, but when Jacobi— _Daniel_ —kept his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead, he realized he’d… perhaps, misjudged something.

“Nah, I just… haven’t heard my first name in a while.”

The rain began to let up.

“I felt the same,” admitted Warren, after a moment. “But if you don’t want to call me Warren…”

“Think I could give it a try,” said Daniel.

* * *

 

The cat, Bette Midler for today (Daniel, it seemed, was running out of names), kneaded the cushions of Warren’s chair, her tiny claws catching on the fabric audibly. Warren sighed, and shoved Jacobi’s— _Daniel’s_  feet aside. Daniel put them back on Warren’s lap before he could do anything else.

“Do your feet hurt, Daniel?” asked Warren. “I can imagine they get  _pret_ -ty sore, don’t they?”

In the end, it was stranger than he’d imagined to move to calling him Daniel, out loud. It _felt_ personal, but then, they’d never been so deep in each other’s pockets as they were these days, despite several years of running Daniel’s life. They woke up at the same time in the mornings, even, despite their differing schedules, because once Warren started wandering around in the kitchen, Daniel couldn’t sleep. They drank coffee together, usually in comfortable silence. Daniel liked corn flakes for breakfast, Warren liked eggs and toast. Once, Daniel made them pancakes, on a weekend.

And they slept at the same times, too, or, at the very least, the lights went out across the apartment at roughly the same time every night, even if Daniel stayed up late on his computer.

It was okay, now, to be this familiar. They weren’t… who they’d been. It made sense, Warren told himself.

“Oh, God, yes,” said Daniel. “God. I hate people. I hate all of them. I wished I was back on the—you know, it’s not really my feet, but my calves? You know it’s worse standing in one place all day, than walking around? And they’ll barely even let the pregnant cashier sit down?”

“Mm.”

Warren ran a silicon-cased finger up the bottom of Daniel’s foot, and Daniel yanked it away, kicking him with the other foot in the process. Daniel didn’t apologize.

“You know,” said Warren. “You could get your feet off of my lap.”

“Hm. Yeah. But then how would I reclaim my territory? I seem to recall having lay down here before you got here.”

…Time to bring out the big guns. Warren picked up Daniel’s foot, the one he’d been kicked with—holding it tight when Daniel moved to yank it away again. He dug the pads of his thumbs into the arch of Jacobi’s heel, one real, one fake, but the pressure was the same as near as he could tell. He usually forgot about the fake hand, to tell the truth.

Warren worked his way up to the balls of Daniel’s feet, and back down again. Daniel stopped struggling after a moment, and shoved his foot at Warren the next.

“Oh, my God.”

Warren dug harder with the pads of his thumbs. Daniel made a noise that could only have been described as obscene.

“What were you saying about your calves?”

Daniel moaned again.

“If you do this to my calves. I’d… die.”

“Is that a request?”

Daniel covered his eyes with his hand. Warren couldn’t help but smile.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Please don’t stop.”

“I was a massage therapist in… Colorado for a while, you know.”

“Don’t think I don’t know better than to ask for more details.”

Daniel sank down onto the couch, rolling his shoulders back. He flexed his toes, and Warren responded in kind, by making his way up Daniel’s foot again—it was nice, in a way, to be trusted again. Human contact… hadn’t been in the cards, for a few years now.

I was sure Jacobi would lay down his life if I asked him to.

It seemed ten years ago. He could hardly remember Minkowski’s face. She must’ve reacted to that, she must’ve scowled at him.

How could he have been _sure_ of that? How could he have been sure of anything at all? He’d thought he knew Daniel Jacobi under pressure, knew his whole life story. He knew about his father, of course, Daniel had told him as much the day they’d met, and he knew the country that Daniel’s mother had come from, as much of the life she’d left behind as anyone could find, the wars they’d fought in and the businesses they’d run, the money they’d made.

The sorts of things that mattered to Command. He’d had the files memorized, back then. The important things, anyway, the things like where Daniel’s loyalties might have been, if not with Goddard—the kinds of things that Daniel might have been able to do. Results mattered, not… the facts.

_I didn’t know how much he’d like a foot massage_. _I barely knew his age. I didn’t even know Maxwell’s, when they asked_. And that was such a small thing, wasn’t it? In the grand scheme of things, he’d never needed to know the age they were, only that they could do the jobs he asked. They’d really never needed to consider foot massages at all.

“Why didn’t you go back? To any of the things you did?” Daniel asked, suddenly.

“Well, you know,” said Warren. “I’ve never been the kind of man to… settle down. Can’t imagine trying something twice, I suppose.”

“So you’re not going to stay at the school forever.”

“No.” The answer came easily, though Warren had never thought about it before. He paused for a moment, after he spoke. So simple—so easy to say. Muscle memory. Just… habit, same way as it was habit to circle his thumbs over the balls of Jacobi’s feet. Old habit—a habit he hadn’t practiced in a long time, but still habit, nonetheless. He amended it. “Probably not.”

He set down the foot he’d been working on, and picked up Daniel’s other foot.

“Is it only that it’s fun for now?” asked Daniel.

Warren pressed his thumbs deep into the arch of Daniel’s foot.

He wanted a reaction.

—He wanted a  _drink_.

“Never mind,” said Daniel. “I actually don’t care. Keep doing that.”

“You got it,” said Warren, watching Daniel’s face. As expected, Daniel’s eyes opened at that, and their gazes met. Daniel shut his eyes again—

“Let me know when you’ve had enough,” said Warren.

“I never know when I’ve had enough.”

Wasn't that right? Warren could see Daniel’s hands relax, could tell, when Daniel was flexing his feet against the pressure of Warren’s hands. Daniel’s mouth was half open.

_I could_ , he thought,  _if I just… got up right now. I could walk over there, brace myself against the side of the couch, and kiss him. Like… Sleeping Beauty._

“Lots of jobs are fun,” he said aloud, absently, as though they’d never left the conversational track regarding his current employment. “Teaching’s fun, you know, but what I really miss? I miss having a team. Kinda miss being in a band, kinda miss Goddard Futuristics.”

Daniel didn’t flinch.

“Me, too.”

* * *

 

He woke up, mid-evening, to something pressing against his forehead, having fallen asleep shortly after he got home from the school and had made himself dinner. The early-evening twilight sun streamed through their window, casting a pretty, golden glow over their living room. Earlier that day, one of the kids had pissed his pants. Warren had needed to contact parents, help clean up the mess…

It’d been a long day.

Daniel was standing above him, holding a small strip of glossy paper in one hand, which curled as if it had been ripped from a roll of some kind, and an envelope in the other—an envelope with three perforated sides, which Daniel was waving in his face. Warren hazarded a guess.

“Is that a paycheck?”

Warren applauded, each clap ringing in the tiny living room. As he grinned, he noticed that, where Daniel had pressed his fingers to Warren’s forehead to wake him up, his own face was decidedly… stiff. He reached up, and was surprised at his inability to find purchase against a slick, plastic surface there.

A second try revealed the edge of the sticker, and he peeled it off, to find a bright, yellow circle that said FUTURE CUSTOMER in what could be described as fun lettering, if one had nothing but the free fonts that came with the cheapest word processing software available.

He stuck the sticker on the couch. Instant as a gunshot, Daniel reached forward and yanked it off.

“Are you an  _animal?_  You’ll get cheap sticker glue on the leather.”

“I’m proud of you,” said Warren.

Daniel examined the sticker, pulling it off of his hand and re-attaching it to the glossy paper backing it had come with. He began to fold the envelope on the perforations, peeling the edges off one by one.

It might have been casual, how he didn’t look up at Warren, dark eyes decidedly focused on the task at his fingertips. He hadn’t gotten a haircut in a while, either, and, contrary to all expectations, his straight, shiny dark hair stuck out at an angle—not long enough that its own weight would pull it down over his face, too thick to lie flat.

“It’s not going to be a good check,” said Daniel. “I’ve only worked there like, what, a week?”

“It’s money. And it’s yours. And it’s not going to bounce when you deposit it. That makes it a good check.”

“…Yes,” said Daniel.

Something in his tone made Warren pause before he spoke, too.

“I missed that,” said Daniel, after a minute. “Money, and it being mine. I didn’t have anything when we got back. You kept this place, you opened it up to me, even though I couldn’t do anything for you. I wanted you to know, I—I think about that a lot.”

Couldn’t have done it without you.

But that wasn’t true, was it? Warren Kepler could’ve built a new life for himself. He could’ve afforded it, on his own. Maybe it would have even been easier.

No sarcastic quips, no one laying around the apartment, whining about the wifi speed and the lack of reliably warm water. No… company. No cat. No one to look out for.

No one to stick their feet on Warren’s lap, no petulant sneers.

“I was glad to have you by my side,” said Warren, softly.

Daniel swallowed.

“I always wondered if you’d take us with you,” said Daniel, “like, you know how things were. There was always a chance that Goddard would throw us under the bus, and we’d have to get the hell out of Dodge, which is, yeah, what happened. I guess I always wondered if we were on your ‘keep’ list for when that day came.”

Warren shifted on the couch, suddenly wishing he wasn’t seated. There was a truth, there, to Daniel’s question, that he didn’t want to say. No, he wanted to say—if I went down, I would’ve wanted to go down alone. My project, my team, my head.

(Rolling on the floor, and he remembered Daniel, red-cheeked and eyes unfocused, half on a bar stool and half on a counter, miming the slice of a knife across his neck, making a sucking noise with his tongue to accompany the gesture—the whole moment, looking back, far too grim now. Super dead.)

_I didn’t want to take you or her with me at all. I didn’t want to have to._

“Then I kind of didn’t want to be,” continued Daniel. “I wanted to see you thrown under the bus, and I wanted out. I didn’t want you to take me with you. And then you—did that.”

“But you… are here, aren’t you?” asked Warren. “You thought it’d be a little bit more adventurous, though. Perhaps?”

“Yeah,” said Daniel, thoughtful. “Guess I did. Had some ideas, too, about how to make that happen.”

He leaned down, and Warren realized what he was going to do just a split second before he did it.

Their lips pressed together, Daniel resting his hand on the arm of the couch next to Warren, but otherwise giving him a wide berth. It was a very nearly chaste kiss—just soft lips, no teeth or tongue, not even hands. Against his own better judgment, Warren leaned into it, kissing him, as softly as he was being kissed.

He had half a mind to pull Daniel into his lap, but instead, he broke off the kiss. When they pulled apart, Daniel was steady enough that their noses didn’t bump.

For all that, it wasn’t a very _adventurous_ kiss, but Warren’s heart still raced.

“Thanks,” said Daniel. “That’s what I—wanted to say. I’m gonna… cash this check now. It’s getting late. But I wanted you to be here when I opened it. I wanted to let you know—”

Daniel smiled. Warren’s stomach dropped, wary for a reason he didn’t yet understand.

“I’ll try to take care of myself now.”

_It’s a damn goodbye, or the promise of one in the future_ , thought Warren, and he hated that shock flipped his stomach over, that a strange streak of possessiveness curled up inside him.  _No_. _You can’t, you can’t leave me alone out here—_

But, he supposed, that wasn’t wholly possessiveness at all, was it? It was fear mostly, to be sure, and yes, some jealousy. And something else too, something that wasn’t like the others—something that was like a rush to his cheeks and to his chest, something that, a very long time ago, had made him smile, and lock a door so he could settle down and watch the damn fine show that was a bomb being defused. Something like basking in the glow of a warm, sarcastic ray of sunshine.

Something he’d forgotten when the going got tough, possibly even right around the time that the Urania docked on the Hephaestus, or if not then, shortly thereafter. Something he’d absolutely forgotten by the time that Maxwell…

A sharp smile spread across Daniel’s face. Warren couldn’t bring himself to return it.

“Wow, that sure shut you up, didn’t it? It’s been a while, but I have some gifts in that department—” Just as suddenly, the smile was gone. “Oh—”

Warren held up a hand. Daniel froze.

“Go cash your check, Daniel,” he said, resting his chin on his hand, and crossing his legs. “I’m… afraid I’ve got to be up early tomorrow. Got to… get some rest. But I’ll be here, when you get back.”

Daniel left, strangely silent.

And Warren went to bed.

* * *

 

“You know I don’t see any reason for us to be meeting, especially if we want to avoid Goddard’s notice.”

Isabel Lovelace’s curls caught the wind. Always smart, always prepared, she’d worn a scarf today, and the bright green of it was nice to look at, on a cloudy day, even if the scarf itself had seen better days. Between her folded hands, steam from a little paper cup of coffee gently rose into the air. She’d left the lid off.

“Aw, Captain? You don’t think I’d put you in any danger, do you?”

He beamed.

“You’re still awful,” hissed Lovelace, under her breath, after glancing around just enough to determine that there was no one nearby. “You could’ve just ignored me, but instead you—you drag me out to some goddamn coffeeshop, like the worst fucking date—and it’s not Captain any more, jackass.”

He waved his hands in the air.

“No, no. No, please don’t get the wrong idea. Is it Ms, then? Ms. Lovelace? Ms. Isabel?”

“… _Just_  Lovelace is fine, thank you.”

“Well, you can call me Warren.”

“I’m ready to bolt,” she warned him, and shifted. Her jacket was thick, but not so thick that the trained eye of a top SI-5 operative—even if he was out of practice, having been out of the field a few months now—couldn’t pick up a gun holster. “If you think I’m letting your goons take me, you had better think again. Don’t think that I got out the easy way, and don’t think I don’t know that you’re as human as the rest of anyone else on this planet.”

“And if you think I’m here to capture you,” said Warren, easily, “you have another  _think_  coming. I don’t have goons. I don’t have anyone. I have Mr. Jacobi, but I don’t…  _have_ him.”

That was a way of putting it, for sure.

“Here to warn me, then, since you had your cute little change of heart about a million years too late? Got it. Cool. Don’t care what you’re warning me about, I was going to be out of town by sunset anyway. Thanks. So kind of you. Very gracious, take your generosity and shove it up your ass. Can I go?”

“Here to let you know,” said Warren, “that I’m here. If you need anything. Think I owe you… a debt.”

“Oh, like I would ever ask you for help. No, thanks. I’d really rather die.”

“Funny thing, space,” said Warren. “Gives you a chance to think. But it doesn’t give you much in the way of resources, especially if, as far as the whole world is concerned, no one’s coming back for what you left behind. So you had no idea what you were gonna do when you got back home, besides blow up Goddard Futuristics and maybe yourself if you had to? No plan? How are you doing right now?”

She took a sip of coffee, and then a bite of her croissant. A little bit of almond filling spilled out the other end. The people at the table next to them stood up, leaving them all alone in the corner, and as their conversation drifted off with them, Lovelace began to talk again.

“I don’t need to eat, at least not frequently,” she said, finally. “Not… really. I didn’t realize it for a long time, it was habit. So I can pretend, and I don’t trip anyone’s weirdness sensors, but I don’t need to. Tastes good though and I do, in fact, intend to make you pay in whatever small ways I can. And I can withstand extreme temperatures, I don’t even really need sleep… I just walked away from the crash, and I kept walking, and I hitchhiked a little bit, but mostly I walked. And I haven’t stopped, and now I’m here, but I don’t plan to stay here. I can’t go home. They’re still after me.”

“You need a friend,” said Warren, simply.

“I thought you died,” said Lovelace. She stared straight ahead as she spoke, her dark, intelligent eyes narrowed in a glare. “I thought everyone died. When my part of the shuttle. broke off… I thought—I thought I was all alone—”

Her voice wavered, there.

“Here’s a tip,” said Warren, “you got a radio, Ms. Lovelace?”

She scowled at him.

“What do you think? Who carries a radio these days?”

He pulled a palm-sized radio out of his pocket.

“How about you tune in to—nah, I’ll write it down.” He scribbled a station frequency, and a time, and then checked his phone history, and wrote down a phone number, too. Even his handwriting was tidier now. “You can even call in, how about that? You play your cards right, I bet you’ll get a place to stay out of it. For a little bit.”

“You don’t have to be coy, Colonel.”

“Warren. It’s Warren now. Or it’s fine if you… don’t want to call me that. Took Jacobi a while to take to it.”

“Fine. Who will I be calling, Warren?”

He took a sip of coffee, enjoying the way that her scowl deepened, and the sharpness with which she brushed her hair out of her face.

“Douglas Eiffel, radio personality. You’ll be on air, so, heh, plan out what you’re going to say pretty carefully, but to tell you the truth I haven’t had the heart to look up a private number for him yet. He was… spooked enough the time that Mr. Jacobi and I called him.” Warren took another sip of coffee, as she stared at him in shock. “Oh, and… If you need a reference—say you wanna stay in one place, for the time being. While you plot your big revenge. You worked for me, didn’t you? And you were the craziest, smartest goddamn mutineer I ever went up against—and there were more than a few of those. So my number’s on there, too. That’s all.”

“I’d rather die,” she said. “But… since I can’t do that. Thanks, I guess.”

She stood up, and crumpled her croissant wrapper.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “guess I have to find a phone.”

He reached into his pocket again, and pulled out a disposable cell phone. She snatched it out of his hand, and scowled.

“Why are you helping me so much?”

“Do me a favor,” said Warren. “Give your pursuers hell, and call me and Daniel if you need anything at all.”

“— _Daniel?_ ”

* * *

 

It was a pretty quick stop on the way back from work. Kind of a whim.  _Don’t want anythin’ fancy,_ he told the woman at the shop. Just a decent electric guitar.  _Something to… practice on, it’s been a while, you know. Kind of an amateur now, but I used to be in a funk band. When I get good again, though, you can bet I’ll be back._

And then, he’d had it in his hands. The shop clerk had nodded and wished him luck, kindness and boredom in her eyes, but Warren Kepler… had never needed luck. He had vision, and he’d done this before.

There would be a band, he’d decided, more out of boredom than anything else—at least, it was a place to start, as much as he enjoyed telling stories to kids, and keeping them out of trouble for a few hours a day. He would do some research, too, check in on Lovelace and Eiffel in a few weeks, too. There was a bigger picture, now that they were both back in the game, and Warren couldn’t help it—he planned to stick his nose into it. Where was Hera? Where was Minkowski? Where were _Cutter and Pryce?_

But for now, he just had a cheap little axe, bright, bright green, and one ex-subordinate with a chip on his shoulder, and two people who had his number but weren’t calling yet. The world was practically his oyster. He bought an amp, too, and a few other odds and ends. The terminology came right back, and setting it up, at home, was like riding a bicycle.

The strings bit into the tips of his fingers, though—no calluses there now, even though it was the hand that’d actually handled a guitar before. Just out-of-practice muscle and healed-over fingertips. The other one—the gift hand, pinching the pick between two silicon-cased artificial digits—strummed and picked out rhythms in time, with a precision that amazed him.

“You know,” he said, as the door swung open. Daniel stepped inside, barely even giving him a second glance. They’d gone back to business as usual, even if, Warren suspected, Daniel was still thinking about the… kiss. “Playing guitar—”

“Putting on my pajamas,” announced Daniel. “Then you can make the long story short.”

He brushed past Warren, and Warren kept playing, but… hm. Peeved, he picked out a funk rhythm, counting the sixteenth notes in his head. Something he’d learned early on, never saw on a staff until years later, long after he knew how it felt to play it more than what it sounded like.

_One-e-and-ah-two-e-and-ah_ —

Several repetitions later of the basic line, each one punchier and more precise than the last, he’d almost forgotten that Daniel had even walked in the door.

One more go-around, he told himself, each time he started over. Eight bars, became sixteen, became twenty-four, thirty-two, forty… He shortly lost count of the number of times he’d repeated it, but he could feel the rhythm of it. If he was going to be serious again, he’d want to know the easy things cold. The speakers buzzed, not loud, but close enough to him that the vibrations rang through him, up his ankles—

And if he closed his eyes, he was on stage, in a dinky, hazy little bar somewhere in… Portland? Had it been Portland? He muted the strings harder on the off notes, the chafing no longer annoying him even if his hands were beginning to hurt more, and picked harder on the accents.

There was a tiny, soft shuffling noise.

He looked back up. Daniel was buried in a blanket on the couch, watching him, a little intently.

“Don’t stop on my account.”

“Oh, didn’t plan on it,” said Warren, feeling strange—and after a moment, he realized, he hadn’t been smiling as he spoke. “But I’m afraid if you’re looking for a solo act, you’d best start looking somewhere else.”

“Guitar, and vocals, wasn’t it?” asked Daniel, drawing the blankets up to his chin. “What’s not solo about that? Didn’t that make you the front man? Isn’t that what everyone goes to see?”

“In a way,” said Warren. “But not how you think. Funk guitar’s more percussion, than melody. Singing can be less… of a starring role than bass, depending on how you write the song. You were picturing a rock band, weren’t you? My face plastered all over the posters?”

Daniel shrugged.

Which meant, of course, yes.

“I don’t know jack shit about music,” said Daniel. “And I kind of don’t care. I heard the stories. I don’t want to be lectured. I already know how smart you are. I just want to hear you play.”

Should’ve been a biting thing to say, Daniel should’ve hit harder on the emphasis there. How  _smart_  you  _are_. He even hit it on the off beats, too. I  _heard_  the  _sto_ -ries.

Warren plucked out the same few bars he’d been working on, twice, just to make sure it was good enough to move on, and then a third time, because it still wasn’t. Fourth time, same as the first, a whole lot louder and a whole lot worse!

He hit the whammy bar too hard, and winced. Daniel didn’t seem to notice.

All about the buildup. That was the style, in a nutshell, a hundred years of motifs that tripped over themselves into a crescendo, immense technical skill hiding in deceptively simple and repetitive lines. If you couldn’t play the same line over and over, so precisely played that you could’ve overlaid each try with all the previous and spotted no difference, with no end in sight—in those circumstances, a tiny difference due to human error was failure. An extra grace note, perfectly timed, on purpose? It meant the world.

Warren changed up the rhythm. Not so that it was indistinguishable from what he’d been playing before, but a few different chords—some minor, some not—for tension.

And he kept his eyes on his guitar, on the shine on the pegs, the way that the strings vibrated—keeping an eye out for improperly-executed palm mutings. But the thick silicon casing on his gift hand tended to prove pretty useful on that point. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Daniel was staring fixedly at him, or at least at a point near him.

That was good enough. He couldn’t speak over the line or sing, not without breaking concentration, he wasn’t there yet in his practice. And with the tension of the change, they couldn’t stay here for too long, or it’d be overpowering.

By no means was Warren an expert any more in musical theory, but he knew enough to say that in terms of musical phrases, it ought to be A-A… B… and then A again.

But it was funny. All the old classics, they seemed to fade out, repeating the last few lines. It wasn’t the structure that people were used to, it was a song that wasn’t meant to be recorded, it was meant to be played in front of an audience, while the band vamped and vamped and vamped. It didn’t matter how long it lasted, if the audience was dancing.

Daniel wasn’t dancing, though. This needed an end. And when he switched back to the original line, that final A phrase, he heard Daniel exhale softly, through his nose, like he’d been holding his breath for the past sixteen bars—and he smiled.

“You wanna learn drums?”

* * *

 

It became a routine, almost, to practice while Daniel worked in the same room, scrolling through classifieds and job search sites. When Daniel picked up speed again, ambition nearly audible in his voice like an engine, Warren couldn’t blame him.

“Dental hygienist, maybe?” murmured Daniel, over Warren’s constant plucking of guitar strings. “I _am_ used to being a monster, after all.”

Warren smirked.

Tonight, he had several guitar lesson books in front of him—practicing chord sequences and progressions. Picking out a single-note line was all well and good, but chords were vital.

“Can’t see you working with _teeth_.”

“Well, I’m not going to be your roadie if this band thing works out, so don’t even try that. I can keep this place, though. While you travel.”

“Not for a while yet,” said Warren, absently. “There’s still, oh, six months in the school year?”

Daniel snorted.

“Too long, huh?”

“Not at all,” said Warren. “I was thinking of sticking it out for two years, at least.”

“Really?”

Warren hit the wrong note, and tried again.

“Really.”

“So you’re going to be here for two years.”

“Hm,” said Warren, playing the A and D strings together. The A had gone flat, and he hadn’t even been practicing that long. “Is it… important how long I’m here?”

“Well, I mean, yeah,” said Daniel. He paused. “Wait, seriously? Why wouldn’t it be?”

Warren tuned the A string back down—he’d overshot it, and he played the two strings again. You figure it out, wise guy, he thought, with, possibly, more irritation than was necessary.

“You’re kicking me out?”

Warren glanced up.

“Thought you didn’t want to stay?”

Daniel shut the laptop, not hard, but Princess Peach jumped up and took off, a furry gray blur down their hallway.

“You thought I didn’t want to stay? Like, I got a new job, and I kissed you and you uh, weren’t that into it, so I was going to just leave as soon as I had enough money? Okay. Yeah, that’s fair. I thought about it. A lot. I wondered if I just ran out of things to break, and I broke the last thing I had. Out of habit, you know?”

Warren absorbed himself in the tuning process of his guitar. Daniel set his computer down, and crossed the room, to where Warren was sitting, on the chair ordinarily occupied by the cat.

“What? No comment?”

Warren strummed the strings—

“But you  _did_  kiss me back,” said Daniel, suddenly. “You’re… you’re _hiding_.”

Warren tweaked the pegs again, wishing he knew which way he was supposed to be tuning it, wondering what happened to the Daniel Jacobi who didn’t try to _read him like a book_.

_You used to think you could figure me out by poking at Goddard’s servers_. Now all Daniel had to do was look at him, it seemed. Didn’t see a title, didn’t see a man in charge.

It could’ve made Warren angry. It didn’t. There’d been time enough for anger, back on the ship. But he hadn’t left Daniel behind—didn’t want to leave Daniel behind, and that… in itself, was every card he’d had, splayed out on the table. Sometimes, _he’d never lacked for vision_ had been a euphemism for _gambled with more than he’d had_.

“Do you… want to stay?” asked Warren.

“Yes,” said Daniel. “Co—Kep—Warren.  _Warren_. Put down the guitar.”

Warren set it aside, mouth suddenly dry, and he stood up.

“Let’s try this again,” said Daniel. “I’m going to kiss you. And what would you, Warren, do if I did that?”

Warren lifted his real hand to Daniel’s cheek, thumbed his jawline. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and he was beginning to be… scruffy again. Hardly up to Goddard Futuristics SI-5 standards, to be sure, even for a demolitions expert.

“This,” said Warren, and he leaned down to kiss Daniel first.

Daniel’s hair was soft, right at the nape of his neck—where it’d been neatly shaved into a straight line, on every mission they’d ever gone on, right up until they took off in the Urania. Now it’d grown out a bit, creeping down the back of his neck. Daniel broke off the kiss, but continued it along Warren’s jaw and down his throat.

“That’s a start,” murmured Daniel, into the crook of Warren’s neck, hands already skating along the waistband of Warren’s pants, Warren’s own breath catching when Daniel’s hands brushed against his skin, and Warren remembered just how very _dangerous_ Daniel could be when he wanted.

“The couch?” asked Warren, too caught up in Daniel’s breath against his collar bone to think about anything else.

Daniel shook his head, and grabbed Warren’s shirt, tugging them around until Warren was half-stumbling after him. Warren’s shoulders bumped into the doorway, feet dragging along on the carpet, letting Daniel work for it.

But he’d never disappointed.

* * *

 

“I’m… collecting the rest of the crew,” said Warren, when he was sure that no other passers-by in the park were within twenty feet. The bench was just far enough off the path that it could provide one with a sense of cozy privacy. “Still searching for Minkowski, but all signs are pointing to _deceased_. Not sure what I’m going to do yet. Guess it depends on who I find, right?”

Daniel rolled his eyes.

“Oh, like I’m supposed to believe you don’t have a plan.”

“I don’t,” said Warren, beaming. “If you’ve got anything, feel free to run it by me.”

“Not even a half-baked, crazy-ass desperate joke of a plan? Oh, fuck you.”

Warren took a long sip of his coffee, and watched as the ducks swarmed the birdseed he’d just thrown in front of them.

Daniel had agreed to this on the condition that they did not feed the ducks, however, if Warren happened to come across a bag of birdseed on his way there, he doubted that could be helped. There were other couples in the park, people walking little dogs, people just jogging. No one paid them any mind.

Warren… liked it. At least, for now. He liked being part of the world again. He’d never been much of a man to sit on the sidelines. He’d forgotten what that was like, back on the Hephaestus—oh, he’d known what he would be signing up for, but knowing wasn’t the same. Months and months with just Maxwell and Jacobi—they _were_ his favorites, of course, the only people in the world who’d been—

The breeze blew a leaf into his face. He sighed. The leaves were turning, pretty oranges and soft siennas filling up what he could see of the skies from where he was sitting. A nice contrast to the mid-September grey monotony.

“I want to help pay rent,” blurted out Daniel. “We can split it. Um. I think you make more than me, so 50-50 might not be… easy. But—”

…Warren was a damn fool.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“I can pay for myself,” said Daniel, irritably.

“Sure ya can,” said Warren, cheerfully.“After you build up some savings. We’ll figure out a split after your next paycheck, do some math on it all.”

“I know that tone,” said Daniel. “That’s a ‘need to know’ tone. What don’t I need to know?”

“I can’t even pretend to know what you are referring to, Mr. Jacobi.”

Daniel tugged the seed bag out of Warren’s hands. After a brief struggle, Warren relinquished it, and Daniel tucked it under his jacket, on his left side, away from Warren, in an inside pocket. The ducks, after a moment, wandered away.

Warren laced their fingers together, and Daniel, after a moment, relaxed, and leaned onto him.

“None of the money I’ve been using came from working at the school,” said Warren, after a moment. “I won’t need those paychecks for months. This was _a contingency plan._  I’d been ready for this for years, and you—you had never had a _chance_ to prepare.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s what I wasn’t saying, just now.”

“See, here’s the thing—I knew that. If this is going to work, you can’t just… reflexively not say things to me, any more.”

Warren sighed. _Can’t promise_ , he wanted to say.

“Remind me,” he said, after a moment. “This won’t work if I… keep things from you.”

“Got it. So, you don’t want to take down Goddard,” said Daniel, cheek on Warren’s shoulder.

“Hm,” said Warren. Where was this going?

He watched a flock of ducks, a wobbly v-shape, making its way across the sky. Funny how much you could miss seeing animals, when you were in space. Things that were alive—finding food, warmth, shelter—wholly separate from you. Funny how you forgot how _big_ a world could be. You could live in the pockets of several other people, for months on end, and then suddenly—they were gone.

“And you can’t _be_ Goddard. But you’re not—” Daniel continued and drew out his words, fitting a few more vowels into each syllable, an insulting parody of Warren’s own drawl. “—A ma-an who lacks… for _vision_.”

“What’s all this?”

“Figuring out your plan before you do,” said Daniel. “If you’re going to go Commodore Decker on us, I’m out. But it… could be fun. If you don’t do that.”

“We’re going to find Minkowski first,” said Warren. “Figure out where Eiffel’s got whatever’s left of Hera. Once we’ve got the team, we’ll make a plan.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” asked Warren, dumbfounded.

“Okay.” Daniel’s shoulders twitched against him, in something that might have been a shrug. “We’ll see where it goes.”

Warren drew back, and stared at him. Daniel straightened up.

“Hey, I was just getting comfortable—”

“ _Okay?_ ”

Daniel shrugged again, but there was a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, even as he clearly tried to keep his expression flat.

“You’re…”

“What can I say? I have bad taste.”

Daniel grinned. Warren laughed.

“And Maxwell would be disappointed,” Daniel said, after a moment. “No—you don’t have to say anything. She’d want me to find Hera, is all. Make sure she’s doing okay, at least.”

Warren shrugged.

“And if Hera doesn’t want you to find her?”

Daniel crossed his legs, and sat back on the bench.

“…Hera’s not my friend.”

“So that’s settled, then.”

“And we’ll take the cat with us.”

“Of course. Anything else?”

“Nope. Don’t question it. _Warren_.” And Daniel leaned forward, and kissed him on the cheek.

“I thought…”

“That I’d be angry?” Daniel shrugged. “That I’d yell at you for gambling with lives again? Hey, I signed up with you in the first place. You know, even at the worst—on the Hephaestus, I never _dreamed_ of coming back to Earth to _settle down_. Give me some time, let me prepare properly this time, so I don’t… end up needing you to save me again. I’ll gamble myself this time, but… yeah, I’m in.”

Daniel found his hand again, and they curled back up.

“No one I’d rather have by my side,” said Warren. “So it’s settled, then. Let’s make some mischief.”


End file.
